


Understanding

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Crossover, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:13:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha meet the newest impossible SHIELD recruit - a girl from a dystopian future called Katniss Everdeen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [a prompt at comment_fic](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/367572.html?thread=63957204#t63957204) \- "Avengers/Hunger Games, Katniss, meet the newest SHIELD recruit."

The girl is only seventeen years old. She's from the future, or at least one possible future, hauled to here and now by one of the semi-mad scientists SHIELD keeps their eyes on. Apparently she's a survivor of some kind of televised deathmatch so brutal even Natasha didn't scoff. And she easily shoots as well as Clint did at that age.

She's perfect for SHIELD special ops assignments, where psychological scar tissue seems to be a prerequisite, as long as you can channel your rage, fear, or need for revenge towards what the organization needs.

Katniss Everdeen is burning with all three. And one last thing that virtually everyone else lacks: the need to protect her family. Not just from her cruel, totalitarian government, because Natasha is more than familiar with that, but from abject starvation.

The world as it is now is not fair, and there are lots of people who can't get enough to eat, but Katniss' world apparently has starvation down to a science. It explains why she shoots as well as she does. She might not have Clint's nigh-supernaturally powerful eyes, but she's been taught by hunger as well as survival. Clint knows there are no two harder teachers than that. 

That's why they let Katniss out with them, once the scientists and psychologists and Fury had gotten done with her. Not because Clint and Natasha, of all the Avengers, would be good for her, because it's beyond SHIELD's ambitions to "fix" their agents. The ways they fracture can produce the sharpest blades, and no one wanted to dull them into normalcy. No, they let Katniss meet them because they understood.

She's seventeen years old. She's killed kids her own age in cold blood. She's carried the weight of her family on her back for years. And she's apparently been forced to expose her heart to her world just to keep the people she cares for alive. Katniss doesn't want sympathy, doesn't need a parental figure, and can't afford a friend.

That's something Clint and Natasha can understand. Clint's there to teach her trick shots, banking arrows and shooting in the worst weather conditions, without a word about anything but archery exchanged between them. Natasha's there to show her to defend herself without the bow in her hands, how to kill someone with her body.

It's therapeutic, it's frighteningly familiar, and Katniss learns to fight like she's trying to punch a hole in the universe, trying to pull herself back home.

Home is a dystopian future full of pain, fear, and uncertainty, where apparently her deathmatch was only the beginning of a new round of horror.

Some people would call trying to get back there crazy. Some people just don't understand. Her family is there, someone who loves her unconditionally and makes life worth living even with all the forces of the world arranged against her.

Clint and Natasha might not have understood that at seventeen. But they did now.


End file.
